“AI notes” has become a catch-all phrase covering three genuinely different things: a transcript, a summary, and a chatbot. Tutors evaluating tools tend to assume they get all three or none — in practice, each one solves a different problem, and it’s worth knowing which one you actually need.
A transcript is not a summary
A transcript is every word of the session, timestamped. It’s useful for you as the tutor — you can jump back to the exact minute you explained something a particular way — but it’s rarely what a parent wants to read. Nobody is scrolling through a 45-minute word-for-word record after a workday.
A summary is the actual deliverable most people mean when they say “AI notes”: what was covered, what the student understood, what to work on before next time. That’s the thing worth sending a parent.
Why parents specifically ask for this
A parent paying for tutoring has almost no visibility into what actually happens in a session. They see a calendar event and a recurring charge. A short, honest recap after every lesson — even three sentences — is the difference between “my kid has tutoring” and “my kid worked on quadratic equations today and needs to practice factoring before Thursday.” That visibility is what makes a parent renew for another month without being asked.
- A summary answers: what happened, and what’s next.
- A transcript answers: what exactly was said, word for word.
- A chatbot that can answer questions about a past session answers: “wait, what did the tutor say about X again?” — for the student, on their own time, without re-watching the whole recording.
How this works in LumenBoard
Every real session over 25 minutes records automatically — the whiteboard and audio, not a camera grid — with no setup required. That part happens on every plan that includes recording. The AI layer sits on top of it and is opt-in, deliberately not controlled by the tutor:
- Students turn AI notes on per room, and get a timestamped transcript, a lesson summary, and a searchable notes feed across every session.
- Parents turn recaps on per child, independently of what the student chooses — the tutor never has to remember to send anything.
- Students with notes on can also ask a question about a past session and get an answer grounded in what was actually said, with the answer citing the timestamp it came from — or saying plainly that it wasn’t covered.
What to actually check before you pay for this
If a tool advertises “AI notes,” ask specifically: is it a transcript, a summary, or both? Is it opt-in or does the tutor have to remember to trigger it? Does it go to the student, the parent, or both — and can each side choose independently? Those three questions will tell you more than the feature name will.